My partner asked me what the future of gaming is. She is serious with her question, she wants to know what the next 5 years will hold for us all. Within 10 minutes of asking the question my brains exploded all over the wall and I needed to sit down and breath into a brown paper bag. I had so much going around in my head that I couldn't clearly say anything without either contradicting myself or arguing with myself ... I managed to narrow-down the questions to one important question that will dictate what happens next. What Is The Future Of The Current Delivery Methods In The Next 5 Years? High Street Stores, Mail Order & Digital.
it'll go the way of hollywood, publisher execs will decide everything more so then they do now & games will be designed purely on market statistics. Studios will be exploited in order to meet unrealistic targets set by publishers and for every good game there will be a dozen or so overhyped MW2's gaming communities will die in favour of flavour of the month games whilst indie gaming will rise as real gamers make a stand, those gamers will ultimatly be ignored by the ignorant masses only interested in generic shooter 15 which will be priced at £90 and ultimatly lasting 2 hours and will be released for whatever platform throws enough money at them but thats ok because a monthly subscription to that developer will enable them to DLC, something that USED to be given out to fans of the game by the kindness of supporting thier product a year after it was released.
everything will be a steam clone, and done badly. We will be whining about the gaming industry ruining it for themselves and people at valve still laughing at how wrong some companies have it. They would have also just released ep3 and portal 2 and are now thinking about updating tf2, for fun. Gabe would still be fat, and the jokes wouldnt be funny anymore.
It will be largely the same. More awards for single-player games written by Hollywood directors and the game industry getting more main-stream media coverage for it. We will continue to buy less games at stores and steam will be pretty much the way we run every game we have. Duke Nukem Forever will be released in 2014 by Steven Speilberg and GT5 will be released in 2013 with the exact same boring format of all the other GT's but with no updated graphics. Everyone will buy it anyway.
I can see a successful emergence of streaming services like OnLive and I agree that physical media will become a minority share of the overall market.
the xbox 4th dimension will be launched with clip off panels and new ones you can buy in every different colour to match your room or mood of the time and will include new exclusive digital rights management linked to your xbox live membership (ala steam) therefore killing of console second hand sales. this in turn will close all high street game shops but one where there will be no pc games to be seen or even wispered off all pc gaming will be done through steam or clones a brand new linux based operating system will be launched called Steam OS which will focus primarily on gaming with a side order of internet/media and office ability streaming games services (onlive) will be an epic fail due to bandwidth issues and traffic management at peak times a re-emergence of private games studios will start to appear focusing on game play and storyline and not just pretty graphics and media hype more advance game control will come in like the current wii fit idea using motion sensing controlers linked to a motion capture camera where you actually 'are' the person in a FPS having to run, aim, duck etc
Digital UP, What About Mail Order & High Street? It seems unanimous that digital is increasing and will continue to increase, maybe the pace at which it increases could be debated. But what about mail order and high street stores? What does the future hold for those?
I have to agree, corporate greed gets in the way of producing truly great games imo. Companies have to make money thats a given, but the way its going every game will just be rehashed from a previous effort. indie devs produce some great games and if they can get a large foot in the door, we could see a rise in properly good games, based on new ideas/designs.
in the next five years? very little digital dist will increase but consoles will still treat hard copies as their main distribution method as they cant justify as large a cut on a digital copy. the console wont die down either as the generally/demographic older pc market gets older and younger gamers emerge every year. I dont think the pc market will die though. mainstreaming will encourage more people into gaming, which like it or not keeps gaming alive, it may be watering down the quality of games. I think education about better games should be used to solve this rather than name labeling and elitism. gaming is your hobby but its a business hopefully the arms race for graphics dies down and equilibrium is achieved and more time might get spent on gameplay/story than trying to keep up with graphics that demand more all the time. but thats alittle off subject
